My Life So Far

How I saw a U.F.O part 2

How I Saw A U.F.O.—Part II

One evening after work, I asked the German girl to come sit with me by the lake. I wasn’t particularly attracted to her, but she was friendly, and a conversation with a young woman, even one who is far from beautiful, is not a pleasure to be overlooked or to be taken lightly.
I was curious about what this blue-eyed girl wish short blonde hair thought about working in a pleasure camp for Jewish children and teenagers, but the conversation never went in that direction. We compared notes on the life in Europe and life in America as I understood it.
The night was cool enough to justify wearing sweatshirts, and the windless sky was clear. Every star clearly stood out against a dark canopy of the sky unadulterated by the lights of the electric bulbs of a big city.
(Here, by way of an apophasis, it is customary in a story about a U.F.O. to say that I will not try to mention the absence of alcohol at the camp or my teetotaler habits so as to establish the clarity of mind and perception; but I will not succumb to convention even to that degree.)
At a certain point in my conversation with the young woman, I said to her, “Do you see that star moving from East to West in a straight line? It must be a satellite.”
I pointed out the moving star, and we watched it until it suddenly stopped and just hung there motionless—a star among other stars; then, from the western sky, another star descended toward the first, and the second star approached at a 45 degree downward angle until it stopped above and the right of the first star.
The two objects hung there for about a minute; then the first star shot straight up, and I saw it flash-up across the clear sky into space in a fraction of a split-second; I did not even have time to exhale. I have never seen anything move so fast either before or since. In my limited experience, nothing made by human hands can move that fast.
A few seconds after the first object dashed off into space, the second object assumed the same course on which the first object coasted initially. For about a minute, I watched the second object as it slowly sailed across the sky from East to West; then this object also vanished as its light was eclipsed by the shadow of the Earth.
These aerial maneuvers did not disturb the environment. I did not hear a sonic boom—a sound that accompanies breaking the speed of sound inside the atmosphere; this leads me to believe that the object was above the highest reaches of the atmosphere—contact with a gas would convey sound, and there was none.
I recall a fleeting thought—“What kind of noise pollution requirements must’ve been legislated in a society where these craft are manufactured so as to make them so silent?” Then I realized that the object was probably not inside an atmosphere.
After the second object disappeared, I asked the young woman, “Did you see that?”
“Yes I did,” she said, “what do you think it was?”
I thought for a second, and then I heard myself saying almost against my will, “Weather balloon,” and we both shared an uneasy laugh. Soon after that, I walked the girl to the campers’ cabins, and we said good night to each other.
As I describe this event, it’s curious to me that I describe it through a prism of an ant looking at something incomprehensible to me like a can of a carbonated drink left unfinished on a patch of grass, with the difference between me and the ant being that an ant can actually climb inside a used can and taste the droplets of an alien concoction, while all I have is a visual recollection.
Today, when I watch the History Channel on television, I realize that my experience in neither special nor uncommon. Thousands of people, many of them aircraft pilots, have witnessed far more spectacular events involving aircraft of various shapes and sizes and variegated methods of propulsion. Some of these craft take-off into space, others settle comfortably into bodies of water or the calderas of volcanoes.
Proliferation of the Earth’s human population along with the high frequency of air travel for a portion of this population has made it possible for a large number of sightings to occur. Many see these craft but not a single individual has any physical evidence of these occurrences. No one can prove having had contact or trade with an alien entity.
I do not have proof of having witnessed what I just described; I have no alien artifact in my possession. I have only memories, thoughts, and conjectures.
The information provided on the telecasts of the History Channel leads me to believe that ours is a decoy civilization. A far older Earth-civilization, and one much more technologically advanced than ours inhabits our Earth. The beings of that super-civilization are out of our reach; their cities are beneath miles of ocean and perhaps inside volcanoes—in environments that humans cannot penetrate even with the aid of most sophisticated machines available to us here.
Their lack of desire to make contact with us is both ominous and troublesome. The indifference is indicative of a behavior of someone who does not want to get involved with beings whose historical permanence is questionable—it appears that they do not want to get (and here I will speculate that these beings have emotions) emotionally attached to us—this is the influence of my ant-on the ant-hill prism.
The other disenheartening possibility is that we are not interesting to them—they don’t care about our art, music, languages, architecture, religions, or our technology. They have moved beyond all of these, otherwise, they would establish trade. It would be interesting to know what interests these “others.”
Soon after the episode by the lake, I returned home to Brooklyn, New York where I prepared for my trip to Honolulu with an interim stop over in Los Angeles. A Hispanic immigrant who worked at the camp offered to give me a ride to Brooklyn, New York; he also got fed up with the conditions—his wife was too beautiful not to catch the eye of the upper management, and she was a good woman and complained to her husband—he sent her home a few days before helping me; he had an old Chevy Nova with rain gutters on the car’s roof. I felt tremendous relief when my roof racks fit perfectly on that car—this allowed me to tie my Wayler windsurfing board on top and to rescue it from camp Equinunk. When we reached the apartment building where I lived, I wanted to pay my new friend, but he refused the money; with difficulty, I convinced him to accept a bottle of wine from the Brotherhood Winery—my parents had a few bottles from their visit there—wonderfully light May Wine the taste of which is still on my tongue compliments of memory.
My windsurfing board made it to Hawaii 2 years after I did; I already had a lighter and more agile board and used the Wayler just a few times. The board had a sad end; I gave it to a Lebanese girl to use as a learning board, and she managed to break it in half. As I hauled the broken remains from her great aunt’s yard, I remembered thinking to myself—at least she did not break me in half, and I was glad that I was never intimate with this Lebanese, blonde woman of German and Polish ancestry (a fluent speaker of Arabic) with whom I communicated in French during a month that she spent in Kailua.
Just after I arrived in Honolulu in 1986 (and a few years prior to meeting the Lebanese girl) I was so consumed with the daily struggle, that I did not have much time to think about the U.F.O., except that once in a great while, I would recall that I did see it, and that that was luckier than the experience of many people. I would also tell students in my English classes about what I saw—I never hid it.
It is not a crime to talk about having seen a U.F.O. nor should talking about seeing it be deemed an act of an insane or unstable person. It is unfortunate that talking openly about this phenomenon carries with a stigma of insanity and opens a speaker’s reputation to disparagement and ridicule.
Open dialog about this phenomenon may yet change the automatic urge to stifle the discussion and dismiss it.
Human beings should live with their eyes open, examine their environment, and discuss occurrences that do not have an explanation that fits into our limited understanding of our environment. To ridicule a phenomenon which does not have an explanation at the present time is tantamount to medieval thinking and retrograde behavior. I hope human beings can free themselves to discuss what they see and to seek answers that may have an impact on the future history of our species.